23rd July, 1941
Das Oberkommando der Wehrmacht gibt bekannt:
It's getting interesting, the german army is closing in on Moscow and Leningrad and the soviets havent yet found a way to stop or even slow us down, but now is the time where they can no longer afford to retreat, now they have to stand and fight or lose this war.
Leningrad is an important industrial city, but despite the humiliation of beeing unable to defend a major city of the soviet union, the soviets could probably fight on even after surrendering here. But moscow really is the heart of this nation, a 20% replacement hit and the loss of the major reinforcement entrance point might spell early doom on the soviets. The soviets simply cant afford to lose moscow this early in the war, and I am sure they will fight tooth and nail to defend it.
AGN
AGN is slowly reuniting again, the divisions send through the balticum finished clearing out any soviet resistance and are now about to cross the Narva river north of lake Peipus, to join in on the attack towards Leningrad. The main engagement this turn was fought at the southern Luga river, north of lake Il'men' where the remaining soviet defenders had to be destroyed. After succeeding here, my divisions continued to advance towards the outer Leningrad defence perimeter, roughtly 40km from the city center. Screening forces advance on our right flank to clear the woods of any soviet remainder, but resistance is reported to be almost nonexistent here.
AGC
AGC is continuing to push towards moscow and this turn we meat a new defence line, consisting of almost 30 divisions but stretched out thinly to cover a broad front. In our northern sector we already succeeded last turn in splitting this defence line into two, a smaller northern end with 8 divisions and the bigger southern wing. The northern soviet defence was pinned down by a few infantry regiments while strong german forces bypassed it to the north throuh Kalinin (5% industrial city) and to the south through Rzhev. After finishing the encircelment we began reducing this pocket and in the end succeeded to force the remaining defenders into a just 10km wide area. It is estimated that these forces will surrender soon.
The southern wing of AGC had to frontally assault the soviet divisions defending here, luckily for us the soviets had no reserves, no artillery support, no great defence terrain and not enough time to propperly dig in. Even though we smashed the soviets pretty badly, we still had bad luck, or, to tell the truth, didnt coordinate this attack propperly, therefor pushed the soviets back, badly hurting them but failed to actually encircle them. This means we'll have to spend another turn to actually destroy the now disorganized defenders, and this will slow us down a bit on our drive towards moscow. But we are confident that this will just delay the fall of moscow, and will be of no greater significants otherwise.
AGS
AGS had little to report this turn, the bulk of my forces is pushing forward south of the Dnepr river towards the Dnepr bend, which, once crossed, will open up the entire industrial hinterland of the soviet union for our forces. Some soviet divisions were sighted going into defencive positions here, but they are deemed way to few to actually stop us. On our southern wing some remaining soviet marine brigades had to be cleared from Nikolaev, and future plans are that after crossing the southern end of the Dnepr we will be in a good position to prepare assaulting the crim with the primary goal beeing Sevastopol.
Finland
The fins continued to clear the remaining soviets from their territory, and now the only known soviets forces on finish territory are a militia division and a fortress brigade. Its almost peacefull again in this godforsaken country
Luftwaffe
The Luftwaffe helped overcome the various soviet defences by supporting our ground forces with deadly air strikes, softening up the defenders and protecting my regiments from the soviet airforce. We took some losses, but the number of shot down soviet planes still by far outwights our own, and our losses will be easily replaced by freshly produced planes from our home industry.
Estimated soviet losses this turn:
15 Rifle Divisions
6 Tank Divisions
0 Motorized Division
Outlook: This is for sure the climax of this war, the soviets have now to pump everything they have into the defence of moscow or risk losing their capital city and probably the war after just two month of fighting. While the moscow defences still look pretty weak (mostly militia divisions), my recon planes reported a huge number of probably reconstituted division in the Gorkiy area, alone 36 infantry divisions and several brigade sized units were spotted here, and there might be even more that escaped beeing uncovered by my recon. The challenge for the soviets will now be to quickly get these divisions into fighting condition and into moscow, time is running out and the next few weeks promise to be real interesting